There are few countries in the world with such varieties of climate
as Australia, and though some stations are out in the great, red-hot,
frying wastes of the Never-Never, others are up in the hills where
a hot night is a thing unknown, where snow falls occasionally, and
where it is no uncommon thing to spend a summer's evening by the
side of a roaring fire. In the matter of improvements, too, stations
vary greatly. Some are in a wilderness, with fittings to match;
others have telephones between homestead and out-stations, the
jackeroos dress for dinner, and the station hands are cowed into
touching their hats and saying "Sir." Also stations are of all
sizes, and the man who is considered quite a big squatter in the
settled districts is thought small potatoes by the magnate "out
back," who shears a hundred and fifty thousand sheep, and has an
overdraft like the National Debt.
Kuryong was a hill-country station of about sixty thousand acres
all told; but they were good acres, as no one knew better than old
Bully Grant, the owner, of whose history and disposition we heard
something from Pinnock at the club. It was a highly improved place,
with a fine homestead--thanks to Bully Grant's money, for in the
old days it had been a very different sort of place--and its history
is typical of the history of hundreds of others.
When Andrew Gordon first bought it, it was held under lease from
the Crown, and there were no improvements to speak of. The station
homestead, so lovingly descanted upon in the advertisement,
consisted of a two-roomed slab hut; the woolshed, where the sheep
were shorn, was made of gumtree trunks roofed with bark. The wool
went down to Sydney, and station supplies came back, in huge waggons
drawn by eighteen or twenty bullocks, that travelled nine miles a
day on a journey of three hundred miles. There were no neighbours
except at the township of Kiley's Crossing, which consisted of
two public-houses and a store. It was a rough life for the young
squatter, and evidently he found it lonely; for on a visit to Sydney
he fell in love with and married a dainty girl of French descent.
Refined, well-educated, and fragile-looking, she seemed about the
last person in the world to take out to a slab-hut homestead as a
squatter's wife. But there is an old saying that blood will tell;
and with all the courage of her Huguenot ancestry she faced the
roughness and discomforts of bush life. On her arrival at the station
the old two-roomed hut was plastered and whitewashed, additional
rooms were built, and quite a neat little home was the result. Seasons
were good, and the young squatter might have gone on shearing sheep
and selling fat stock till the end of his life but for the advent
of free selection in 1861.